I’ve been writing a lot about game consoles lately, mostly because a lot has been going on with gaming. To date I’ve mostly been focusing on the Xbox One and the degree to which it contributes to the troubling industry trend – intensely apparent in the game industry but by no means confined to it – of eroding the power of owners and turning them increasingly into users/renters. With the release of the Xbox one, I – and many others – wondered if this marked the final push in the setting of massive industry standards. If, with the Xbox One’s hopelessly restrictive and confusing game lending/resale process and its daily “phone home” requirement, this was simply going to become the norm. Which would mean a serious blow to the power of technology consumers and an important and worrying redefinition of our relationship with the technology that augments our daily lived experience.

Then E3 happened.

A quick explanation: E3 – the Electronic Entertainment Expo – is the annual trade fair of the game industry. It’s a big deal, a huge publicity event, and one where game developers and hardware manufacturers show off new products and create buzz around those still in development. It’s where, this week, Sony unveiled the next generation of the Playstation console, the PS4. Coming on the heels of the Xbox One reveal, this would have been a big enough deal; Microsoft was naturally also at E3 to push the Xbox One, and everyone was waiting to see how the two giants would go head to head.

What happened is that Sony presented the PS4 as the anti-Xbox. In so doing, they presented themselves as the anti-Microsoft. And Microsoft got shellacked.

Twitter exploded as Sony outlined the major features of the PS4. No internet connectivity requirement. It’s easy to lend, trade, and resell games an unlimited number of times (they claimed, initially; it now appears that third-party developers may have final say there). No in-built console DRM, at least not of the oppressive kind included with the Xbox One. All that control freak stuff that Microsoft intends to do, Sony said? We won’t do that. We’re not evil.

So why should anyone outside the game industry care about this? Because by setting itself up against Microsoft in terms of how much control over its technology it seeks to retain, Sony is introducing the possibility of another way forward in terms of the relationship it affords between technology and technology owners. It’s turning aside from the trend I mentioned above, and it’s doing so in a very public fashion. It’s far from the first corporate entity to do this, but it is one of the most visible.

Let’s be clear about something: Sony isn’t any more or less evil than Microsoft. Sony is just smarter. I’ve said before that one of the things that I think is valuable about DRM disasters like we saw with SimCity and Diablo III is that they bring these issues to the surface and make them impossible to ignore. They expose the direction of the changing definition of “owner” and spark a conversation regarding how we really want things to go. They also make people angry, and these angry people yell. The yelling becomes pressure. If there’s enough pressure, corporations respond.

Microsoft didn’t. So Sony did it for them. Sony saw how people responded to the DRM-y issues with the Xbox One and turned it into a marketing strategy. They’re arguing that not only should oppressive DRM not be an industry standard, but that positioning oneself as opposed to it can win market share.

But let’s be clear about something else: Sony is positioning itself against the kind of DRM that Microsoft built into the Xbox One, which is DRM of a very apparent sort. There’s visible, bad DRM that makes very clear how little control owners have over a device. And then there’s invisible, good DRM that never gets in the way of anything, that never makes waves, that makes no one angry and sparks no conversations. Right now DRM technology is still arguably in its infancy, and there’s more of the former than the latter. But if there was more of the latter than the former, the furor over the Xbox One probably never would have happened, and Sony wouldn’t be adopting the marketing strategy that it is. The downward slide from owners to users would continue unchecked.

So this is a hopeful sign. But we shouldn’t regard it as the end of DRM. And we shouldn’t automatically trust companies to not be evil about it, regardless of what industry we’re talking about.

Sarah yells angrily about everything on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry